Lots of snow here in Massachusetts, keeping me indoors even more than the cold does, and therefore I am more likely to be doing something genealogical. I have been working on one of my small projects and started another which is bigger than I had originally thought (isn’t it always the way?).

I have been filling in a spreadsheet of my direct Salt ancestors with their vital information (dates for birth, death, etc.) and marking those which I have good sources for. I continue to be surprised at the close-to-me ancestors (like my maternal grandfather for example) for whom I have no good source for birth. Since he was born in 1896 in Ohio, I would expect that there should be a birth registry for the county but so far I have had no luck finding it. Come on, familysearch.org!! As part of the spreadsheet I am also tracking what records have been entered in Clooz which is where I want to track documents and sources. Green in a cell shows I have documentation (or it is a “yes”) and red shows I still have work to do. I already see too many red cells, but it makes it easier to see what work I have to do. As soon as I finish filling in the spreadsheet I will go back and start entering the rest in Clooz and work on creating a list or spreadsheet of what I need to look for and where.

I also have started on a new family tree for a wedding in the spring. One of our nephews is marrying and I want to create a family tree for the newly created family as a wedding present. I did something like this last summer for another nephew and had a lot of fun. Likewise, this time around is being fun and I am both learning more about the two families but also about an unsuspected connection between the bride and one of my mother’s family lines. In addition, one of the delightful benefits to doing this sort of project is meeting and interacting with the bride’s mother (so far in cyberspace) and discovering that she too is the family historian. Small world sometimes. I will be working more on this project in February and looking forward to many more exciting discoveries.

My last goals for February include finalizing the transcript I have drafted of the will of William Denman made in 1738 originally, which I found at The Keep in September. I will also start work, and hopefully finish, transcribing the other will I found. This one is for Michael Marten and connects him to a William Denman and a Samuel Denman both of whom are described as sons in law. If I can find the direct link, this William would be the father of my migrant ancestor William Denman. So I’m excited to get this will transcribed.

It has been a long time since I looked at or wrote anything about my Salt emigrant ancestor, so I thought it was about time to put it out there again. In the hopes that somebody who reads this might have new information to provide, I am listing my brick wall ancestor Edward Salt and what I think I know, or want to know, about him.

What I Think I Know about Edward Salt(s):

Grant to Edward Salts, Berkeley County, Virginia, 1781

* in 1781 he was granted land in Berkeley county, Virginia by Thomas, Lord Fairfax, and was named as being “of Berkeley County”.

* in 1790 for the first federal census there was an Edward Salts enumerated in western Pennsylvania (Georges Township, Fayette, Pennsylvania). I have always assumed (and yes, I should know better!) that this is my ancestor. Even though the list of individuals in the household is missing one of the females who should have been there, I did not question that this was my guy. And of course, this first census only counted males by two age groups and all females in one group. Now, there may be explanations for a missing female in the count, but it is also possible as I have been told since I first wrote my original posting about him, that this is the Other Edward Salts who later moved to southern Ohio but a couple of counties away from my family’s location.

* he was given a certificate acknowledging his having provided goods/services in the American Revolution in Virginia.

*1793-95 – Edward Salt was on tax lists in Bourbon county, Kentucky

* Innocent Salt, one of the daughters, listed her father Edward when she married William Frazier in Bourbon county, Kentucky in 1794. [Was she a minor at that point, and so needed permission to marry?]

* in 1797 daughter Nellie married John Wharton in Mason county, Kentucky

* in 1798 Edward Salt had 4 land transactions listed in Bracken county, Kentucky

* he was listed (as Edward Salts) on a tax list for Bracken county, Kentucky, dated 22 Nov 1799. [Does this mean he owned land in Bracken county on that date?]

* in the July 1813 term of the Clermont county Common Pleas Court Edward Salts was granted a license to keep a ferry for one year

* in 1813 his estate was administered in Clermont county, Ohio. [He died intestate and John and Edward Salt were listed as administrators. He owned land in Nicholas county, Kentucky which passed to his 5 children.]

* John and Edward Salt were listed on the estate papers of Edward Salt.

What I Still Want To Know:

* who were Edward Salt’s parents and siblings?

* when and where was he born?

* who did he marry, and when and where? [Was his wife really Irish and that was a problem because he was English?]

* when (and from where) did he migrate to the Colonies (and was he first in Virginia or someplace else)?

* was he related to the Thomas Salts who was in the same part of Virginia about the same time? [Edward’s name has been listed in various places as Edward Salts as has one of his sons, John. One of our cousins called the family Salts. Another cousin’s line took to spelling the name Sault. It seems that most of the family lines have settled on Salt since at least the time of my great grandfather.]

* who were his children and when were they born? [I have a list of 5 children – 2 sons and 3 daughters – with approximated birthdates, and each of them at some point listed Virginia as place of birth on a census. These names were in a manuscript compiled by relatives, probably first in the early 1900s. I am not sure where these names came from originally but they are listed in a number of places now as the children of Edward and Mary Salt(s).]

Family Myths:

* he was born in Birmingham, Yorkshire, England [which cannot be, because Birmingham is in the West Midlands] or in Berkshire, England

* he married an Irish woman and that unappreciated marriage led to his needing to migrate to the Colonies (he was disowned)

* he served in the American Revolution and was awarded land in the Virginia Military District in Ohio as a result [he did, apparently, provide goods/services, and son John bought the rights to land from a soldier]

* he migrated from Suffolk County, Virginia to Crab Orchard or Paris, Kentucky in 1790

* he built the first cabin in Franklin Township [Clermont County, Ohio] about 1796

Among the various things I have “inherited” from my Aunt Susan, was a frame with two pictures side-by-side. The frame was the kind that stands on a piece of furniture and I imagined my Aunt Susan keeping this on her dresser top or a table near a favorite chair. I don’t know that this was where she kept it, but it seemed like the sort of picture you would place that way. Sadly, I have no good idea who these people were.

When I pulled this picture out of the box of things, I noticed that it wasn’t well-framed, that the pictures were not matted and were touching the glass. So one day I took the frame apart, hoping that the backs of the pictures might tell me something about these two. A photographer’s stamp, a date, or better yet a name written on the back. Anything could be helpful. The two pictures were mounted at the top on cardboard backings, but unfortunately there was nothing to provide any hints about who they were or when or where the pictures were taken. Except there was some mold on the back of the woman’s picture, probably from being pressed into the cardboard and having been in a house in Florida for a long time. I scanned the two individual pictures and then took them down to my local framer who is good about handling old photographs.

He was not able to do anything about the mold and could not promise he could safely remove the picture from the cardboard backing. The man’s picture was not moldy and came off its backing easily. So I ended up having his picture framed separately, although I had planned to re-frame the two together as they had originally been.

The more I looked at the man’s picture the more I was sure that he must be from Aunt Susan’s Salt family. In looking through an album of old pictures I re-found 2 pictures of young men that looked somewhat like this older man. Based on eye color, and the fact that one of them died as a young man, I entertained the possibility that the other is the same as the older man. Luckily at some point my mother had gotten help identifying some of the pictures in the old album and this young man was named: Edward Wilshire Salt, Jr.

So from this, I have developed my own story about the likely identity of these two older people, based on what I know about the Salt family relationships and who my Aunt might have had pictures of. I believe that the man was Edward Wilshire Salt, Jr. and the woman was his second wife, Clemma Day Swope. Edward (who seems to have gone by E.W. at least on official records) was the younger brother of Aunt Susan’s father, so he was her uncle. He had been part of the legal proceeding when Susan’s father was probated insane and committed to the state mental health hospital, acting as protector of the children’s interests, and I expect he continued to take some part in helping his brother’s family after that. Since Susan was only an infant when her father was hospitalized, Edward may well have served as a father figure for her.

If the woman is Clemma, she would have been the only wife of Edward’s that Susan would have really remembered. Edward’s first wife, Clemma’s sister Margaret, had died in 1895 when Susan was barely two years old. Margaret and Edward had two children, who were older than Susan and her brother by 2-9 years. Edward married Clemma 2 years after Margaret died, so Susan was not quite 4 years old. Edward and Clemma moved West sometime between the census in 1900 (where they were found in Tate Township, Clermont county, Ohio) and the one in 1910 (where they were found in Reno, Nevada). Since Edward’s daughter had married and was living in Reno in 1910 as well, it may be that Edward and Clemma moved to Nevada to be closer to his daughter. So, Aunt Susan wouldn’t have seen much of them after their move West, but might well have wanted their pictures where she could see them.

In the end I am left with the question: is the older man Edward W. Salt? (If he is then it seems highly likely that the woman is Clemma Day Swope Salt.) A brief trial of Picasa’s facial recognition suggested that the older man is the same as the younger (named) man. Any thoughts out there?

Research
* Figure out how to request information about possible records from St. Xavier in Cincinnati.
* Continue to work on updating the Denman database with information already collected and/or noted by cousin Claudia in her review. I already discovered a connection I hadn’t been aware of! A good example of fresh eyes being helpful. [I made some progress on this in May, but I had collected a lot of information that never got put into the database, so it is a bigger job than I first thought. Worth doing, but a bigger job.]
* Start work on Boorman database I just started. I have information from three current researchers now, so should be able to make some progress.

Organization
* Continuing the work listed above on the Denmans is also organizing files on my hard drive (and helping me establish a standard file naming process).
* Start clearing out the files in the small open box on the floor.
* Back up the blog! Plug-ins found so far to automate this task don’t meet my needs However I just saw a review of another one, that looked worth investigating. There is always hope – in the meantime I must remember to do it by hand.

Education
* Watch one online video or webinar about genealogy. [In May I attended a live presentation by Marion Pierre Louis on house history which was fun and, I hope, will inspire me to get to work on that project for my original Salt house. I also managed to catch the Lisa Alzo Legacy Family Tree webinar on Ten Hidden Resources Every Genealogist Should Know over the long holiday weekend while it was still free. I was pleased to see that I was already aware of most of these, but she did remind me that some of them I need to re-visit.]

Easter is pretty early this year and I’ve been remembering the new Easter outfits we all had every year. From the time I can first remember, and likely even before that, my sister and brothers and I had new outfits for Easter. For my sister and me that included coats, hats, gloves, pocketbooks, shoes, and dresses. In my family besides my parents, there are 5 of us, all born in just under 7 years. My sister is exactly 16 months older than I am. So that meant new outfits for 5 children plus two adults (or at least my mother, my father had business suits he could wear). This was in the 1950s and early 1960s, and for all but the last year or two my father was the only wage-earner. So with money being tight, many of our clothes (at least for my sister and me as well as my mother) were homemade.

I’m pretty sure that it started with our Grandma Cena (our mother’s mom) making clothes for us. She was an amazing seamstress and came from the time and place where women made most of the family clothing. Moreover, for the next 5+ years after I was born our mother was busy taking care of infants and toddlers, so I am guessing that Grandma continued to contribute in this way. We lived just far enough from Grandma and Grandpa that we didn’t get to see them very often so she couldn’t help out in other ways. It was always exciting when a box arrived from Grandma with new clothing. From the time I was about 7 or 8, however, Mom made our Easter outfits with Grandma continuing to whip up accessories and outfits for other times.

Margaret and me, 1950

The earliest picture I have come up with so far is from 1950 when I was not quite 3. I don’t remember these outfits but have a half memory of getting the hats. Mine had navy velvet ribbon around the outer edge and I think we helped pick these out ourselves.

me and my big sister, June 1951

The first one I remember was a white dress with a separate organdy pinafore. My sister’s dress has been less clear in my memory’s eye, but I know for sure that it wasn’t scratchy like mine! I would often wear the pinafore by itself if it was hot, and it was stiff fabric that scratched. I don’t know for sure that these were Easter outfits but I’m pretty sure they were. This picture of the two of us in these dresses refreshed my memory a little about these dresses and confirms that we both had pinafores and that the pinafore was worn by itself on occasion.

Margaret and me, 1955

By 1955 my mother was going all out on our outfits. That year she and my sister and I all had pink poodlecloth (that was what she called it) jackets. It was very cool and grown-up feeling to have jackets just like Mom’s. Our dresses were navy, and had permanent-pleated skirts and lace on the collars and appliqued to the fronts. In the picture you can also see the crocheted purses that Grandma Cena had sent (I think they were new that year).

The year after that (either 1956 or 1957, I think) we wore the jackets again but had blue dotted-swiss dresses with cummerbunds and lace on the tops. I’m guessing Easter might have been later that year, since the dresses

Margaret and Pat, maybe 1956

were sleeveless. Of course, we wore our Easter dresses to church and Sunday school all spring and summer.

About 1960

The last Easter picture in this series shows my sister and me as young teenagers. By that time she and I were both making some of our own clothes and I suspect that my sister made this Easter dress for herself. I was in a shy phase about having my picture taken and so was making faces that day.